A Brief Introduction into (De-)Coupling Lifecycles in Net-Centric Systems-of-Systems

As (historically grown) isolated infrastructures coalesce within emerging areas/domains into collaborative Systems-of-Systems (SoS), new higher-level structures are created. If the manifold solutions of the heterogeneous Constituent Systems (CS) are developed in parallel and not viewed from a holistic point of view, innovations emerge locally and uncoordinated resulting in an unmasterable complexity of the overall architecture—unwanted dependencies with a multitude of undesirable side effects for both the SoS and the CS are the inevitable consequence. This contribution investigates how such dependencies arise and how they can be prevented by considering interoperability as the key component for the SoS evolution. For this purpose, the special interoperability requirements within an SoS environment as well as a Reference Designation System (RDS)-based approach to address those are presented.